[ThrustVectoring]

Currently running into this moving from Vim to Spacemacs. Even with vim bindings, it works just slightly differently enough that there's a good chunk of friction. Specifically, mashing escape no longer reliably gets you into normal mode, bash is in a separate window instead of in tmux, some of my settings are different in ways I don't want to spend the time analyzing (probably scrolling? IIRC I set things up to center themselves as best they can in the window in vim), and the tab-completion for opening a file with :e is different through trying to be way more "helpful".

[sokoloff]

Assuming Spacemacs is like regular emacs, Ctrl-g [(keyboard-quit)] is the moral equivalent to esc in vim. Mash away.

If you want esc to work that way, put in your .emacs (but I really discourage it):

  (define-key key-translation-map (kbd "ESC") (kbd "C-g"))